Oghenevwogaga

Chapter 17.1- The Seadragon's Roar

Added 2025-08-07 00:56:11 +0000 UTC

Seaspeaker did not want to be found. Even with all the planning and plotting I did, all the strategies I force dDaemon to implement, we could not find hide nor hair of him on the island. The archer that tried to kill me had given us a location in the forest, confirming an early theory that they were hidden within it but the camp had been ling abandoned by the time we got there. Searching the forest for him didn’t work either. All my would-be assassin had been able to divulge was that Seapeaker somehow always knew when we would be coming, where we would be coming from, and our numbers.

A spy in our ranks? That was a possibility but a relatively remote one. Who would betray House Velaryon to cavort with a dispossessed pirate with a bounty on his head. That would just be pure stupidity. Still, I was left with no clear direction forward. I couldn’t even just send all the men into the forest of r fear that the Speaker would burn even more of the town without the men there to defendd it. He was an interesting foe, that was certain, but Mother refused to countenance moving forward until her husband’s murderer had been found, tortured, and placed in a shallow grave.

Needless to say, it seemed we were going to be spending a lot of time here, at least we were going to be here until someone brought up the untouchable subject— the unthinkable idea. Even with things the way they were, no one really wanted to suggest doing what we needed to do. Father had taken this island for the forest. But the forest now hid his killer, and that was an affront we could not stomach ad infinitum/

“Why haven’t we burned the forest down?” Laena asked as we listened through the third report from Vaemond in twice as many days on just why they kept failing to catch Seaspeaker.

“My lady?” Vaemond asked, he clearly thought he’d misheard. If only he knew that the words she spoke were the only ones on her mind. She was just as singleminded as I could be. When she chose a pat, she stuck it out until the end.